Committing Sociology Since 2010

Plagiarism

Professor Steve Fuller, an eminent sociologist at the university of Warwick recently published a provocative blog post on the ways in which academia deals with plagiarism, titled “Plagiarism: Observations on Academia’s Self-Induced Moral Panic”. In this article, I will discuss the main arguments he outlines and explain why I believe they are misguided.

The central argument of the piece is concerned with moving from what Fuller (2016) describes as a ‘moral’ view of plagiarism, to an ‘aesthetic’ view. I believe that plagiarism is a moral issue and believe that the “aesthetic view” of plagiarism is ineffective at maintaining academic standards. Fuller in the blog notes that we should take lessons from the art world when trying to deal with plagiarism issues and that a fixation on issues such as forgery and fraud merely reflects low academic self esteem. To quote him directly:

“It is too bad that academia does not adopt this relatively relaxed attitude to plagiarism and fraud[.]”

According to Fuller, having an institutional fixation on checking for plagiarism merely “draw[s] attention to just how much academics feel the need to protect their turf from unworthy interlopers.” Having an interest in maintaining rigorous academic standards, is somehow the same as prohibiting particular voices from being heard. The idea that is contentious here, is that the fraudulent contribution is somehow not unworthy. At the end of his blog, he states the following:

“I am asserting an unconditional right of someone who has been allowed into society’s epistemic sphere to range freely within it, as a ‘commons’, unless specifically stopped by a relevant authority for ‘poaching’ or ‘polluting’.”

A major point of contention is the notion between privately owned and publicly owned knowledge, what Professor Fuller refers to in his article as a ‘commons’ . Students already have the ‘unconditional right’ to enter into the epistemic space he describes. Fuller in saying these points wants to highlight the fact that all knowledge is free reign for the student. However, it is not within the student’s right to be cavalier with that knowledge and to treat it with disrespect and to ultimately present it as a product of their own, without reference. Forgery is not qualitatively the same thing as an original, even if it passes as a genuine piece of work. However according to Fuller, if they bypass detection, then it is as good as the original. Passing as genuine is somehow sufficient, even if the material is ultimately an uncredited patchwork. That is why programs like Turnitin are so important for detecting counterfeits.

Fuller suggests an alternative program, one which in essence would protect and guard those willing to submit forgeries. The program would alert students to when their material was in the ‘danger zone’, and offer alternatives in order to prevent work from being regarded as plagiarism.

Fuller will be aware that Turnitin is already used in this manner, often tutors encourage their students to submit ‘drafts’ in order for their original content score to be amended. However, Fuller is advancing something different here. His hypothetical program would offer clear suggestions to students on how they can cover up their misdemeanours. It is not the case that plagiarism should be discouraged, it is simply that we should hide that it even happens by playing elaborate games of “cat and mouse”. Fuller seems eager to dismantle the very academic standards that got him to a position of relative authority as a professor.

Plagiarism was openly advocated and celebrated by writers such as Guy Debord (1994) [1970] and his situationist international colleagues, for precisely the same reasons that Professor Fuller wants plagiarism to be a “cat and mouse game” in the academy. The plagiariser was to reproduce material in an aesthetic fashion. It was a way of initiating ‘progress’, a way of ‘erasing false ideas’ with the ‘right ideas’. This was entirely abstract as is Fuller’s notion of an aesthetic approach to plagiarism. Regardless, Debord and his ilk were appropriating the artistic principles that Fuller describes so glowingly in his blogpost. The problem that this amounts to is comparing apples with oranges. Despite this, it is always convenient to justify stealing other people’s work.

In the Society of the Spectacle, Debord directly highlights the aesthetic approach to plagiarism:

“Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.”

Professor Bauman was outed in 2014, when it became apparent that he had reproduced content directly from Wikipedia without citing it (Jump 2014). In doing so, he replicated many of the errors that were present in these publicly available articles. When a PhD student at the University of Cambridge highlighted these claims in depth, Bauman rebuffed these serious claims by suggesting that high quality scholarship did not require ‘obedience’ to ‘technical’ rules of referencing. It caused a controversy and rightly so. Many realised that there are different standards at different levels of the ivory tower. There is a sense that eminence leads to an insistence on different rules to be applied at different times. A PhD student could not wilfully disregard referencing content and especially could not defend to other academics that citing is merely being obedient to archaic rules that insist on maintaining academic integrity and standards. It cannot be argued that there is a level playing field when it comes to being lackadaisical with referencing and writing with integrity. Hence why academic articles stressing the need to be less anal about technical rules of referencing, are inevitably articles from people who have nothing to lose in such a change. They can hide behind their positions of authority.

It sends the wrong message to place forgery on the same level as scholarship. Forgery that “passes for an original” is not an original, regardless of the aesthetic tricks that the writer took. Forgery can be interesting in the way that a found poem can be interesting. I think this is what Fuller has in mind when he thinks about aesthetic plagiarism of academic texts. Autoethnographic writers like Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams and Carolyn Ellis (see Adams et al 2015) sometimes use a technique called text spinning where passages from academic writing are juxtaposed together in order to stimulate new ideas. Often the purpose of this exercise is to help the researcher’s own experiences come out and ‘spin’ with the theoretical canvas. The difference is apparent, the citations are clearly marked. The original contribution to knowledge is not fabricated. The process is often the starting point for the researcher, in beginning to think creatively and critically about a subject.

Mary Ruefle’s (2006) ‘found poetry’ is often about taking a pre-existing text such as a Victorian novel and eliminating words with white out until a coherent message is found in the novel, that is ‘found’, that is new. This is not however on the same level as a poem that was written without the aid of the Victorian novel as a canvas. Further, it is not copying exact passages, it is using the book as a impetus for stimulating original thought. Another suggestion made by Fuller is that the aesthetic plagiariser uses the ‘archive’ (the internet) as an extended memory store. To quote him directly:

“The key difference is that the forger treats ‘the archive’ (aka ‘the internet’ for today’s generation) as an extended memory store, not as something ontologically distinct from his or her own being.”

The internet is a resource and as a resource, it must be used ethically when appropriating content. It is patently absurd to make such a claim in order to defend what is an indefensible outcome. Students plagiarise using the internet because they understand the internet as an extended memory bank, so therefore it is fine? Fuller apparently holds charlatans to high praise as is demonstrated here:

“Thus, we fail to appreciate that the most devious forger of original work will have mastered the skills that we would have demanded of them”

The forger has not mastered anything, other than stealing other people’s work. The present quote gets at the heart of what is wrong with the aesthetic approach to stealing people’s ideas. As Fuller notes himself:

“The problem with detected plagiarism is more that it is detected than that it is plagiarised: It was not good enough to pass as original.”

Fuller presents an incredibly negative view of what it means to be a teacher in this passage. This is what happens when we apply the principles of postmodernism to integrity in the academy. Students who play elaborate games of trickery in reproducing others work, who might not even understand any of the words that are pasted together, are somehow on the same level as the student tying hard to understand and write coherent, thoughtful and powerful essays that come from their own study and their own understanding of concepts, theory and experience. Why should students even bother in such a toxic environment, if their friends could skilfully juxtapose a bunch of academic texts together and get a better grade?

Academia can be regarded as a mental bricolage, in the sense that we wrestle with ideas and attempt to establish a coherent picture of many different parts. It is like a puzzle and you want to get the right pieces to make your picture look right. Qualitative researchers are quick to say research is messy and it is. There is an argument to have that ideas are not original, that our interpretation of ideas are hardly novel. This however does not mean that all ideas are aesthetically plagiarised, or that written material is in essence copied. The process of the forgery and the progress of the genuine article have different antecedents that are important. Scholarship that takes years to complete, with research strategies that collect data that is meaningful and reflexive of a particular community for example, is qualitatively different from someone going on the internet and copy and pasting passages from that piece of work and then “aesthetically” copy and pasting it within passages of Jane Eyre and then claiming credit.

Fuller wants us to remove the very tools we have in place to try and reduce fraud in our institutions, by putting the onus of plagiarism detection entirely on stressed out, overworked and overburdened academic markers. We should be helping our academics with every tool possible to help detect forgeries. We do not read everything. We are not infallible.

Fuller in wanting to remove or undermine the tools we use to detect plagiarism also states that doing so would “leave the uncaught student to dwell productively in his or her guilt”. This makes about as much sense as deregulating the banks and expecting them to do the right thing every time. Why undermine tools that can assist this process?

It is easy to see why Fuller is making these sort of arguments. It is in the very heart and soul of sociological inquiry to stand up for the underdog, as Howard Becker (1967) famously pointed out. Fuller might see the plagiarising student as being someone who is victimised, or someone who does not fit into a prescriptivist academic climate. It is clear however that if we want to have an academic discipline that people take seriously, we need to defend integrity and make sure we are doing our best to combat corruption. Fuller in his aesthetic approach to plagiarism showcases a very negative view of intellectual labor and the intellectual process. Intellectual ideas are there for everyone to come and take, if they can get away with it. Fuller wants the average student to turn into Shia LaBeouf and it is in everyone’s interest that this does not happen.

I knew Fuller’s post bothered me, and I think you’ve articulated why beyond my stubbornly nonacademic “I worked my ass off on that shit, and this is a GD knowledge economy. BETTER give credit where it’s due!”

This is an interesting, if slightly sad piece. It seems to want to force academics into a position of defending the distinctiveness of their profession in terms of its capacity to protect intellectual property – something which in the future may be done better by a machine than by the academics themselves. We have reached a sorry state when the ‘teaching’ side of our profession has become so preoccupied with evaluating work, rather than demonstrating why such work might be worth undertaking in the first place.

I actually don’t think of myself as a postmodernist, and most people who think of themselves as postmodernists don’t see me as one of their number. However, I do believe that there are some deep lessons in postmodernism – and maybe they are informing my argument.

The difference between art and scholarship is that the artist sees plagiarism on a sliding scale, and hence the ‘anxiety of influence’, whereas the scholar often makes an arbitrary cut. That cut takes place when words are appropriated without formal attribution; hence, Turnitin looms largely in current academic practice.

However, more thoughtful scholars think more like artists: They don’t rate people – students or scholars – who abide by the rules yet manage to say things that depend so much on properly acknowledged sources that their pieces could have been generated by a computer programme that was given a set of references as input data. Much of what passes for academic work in this period of mass publishing has exactly this character. Such work plays by the rules and does so competently, and we generally reward it, even if we do not declare them works of genius. But to my mind, these works sit closer to a kind of ‘plagiarism’ that is worth worrying about: The ‘Plagiarism Plus’ that constitutes what Kuhn called ‘normal science’.

There are only two things that students learn when they learn how to reference academic sources properly: (1) They learn how to communicate in a way that their scholarly audience will easily understand; (2) they learn how to think about academic work as intellectual property that they can rent for their own purposes through proper citation. However, the connection between mastery of these two points and mastery of a domain of scholarship is by no means obvious. Surely, I’m not the only the reader of well-placed sociology journal articles who often wonders whether an author has understood the impressive list of cited works, given how the works are featured in the author’s text.

My point here is that by fetishizing plagiarism to such an extent that we see it as qualitatively ‘Other’ to proper scholarship, we are demystifying academic work to such an extent that it will be eventually reduced to computer-programmed articles evaluated by computer-programmed markers. Palkowski bemoans the plagiarist’s tendency to make life easy for him/herself by avoiding the hard graft of scholarship. Yet, if the history of technology is any indication, defenders of the ‘craft of scholarship’ will need to do more than extol sheer energy expenditure as a virtue. The plagiarist already has efficiency on his/her side.

Essentially, what Fuller is saying as I understand it is that he dislikes how people own knowledge and defend their right to it’s use because it was their idea – which does seem very egotistical and non-conducive to human knowledge development. But this negative view could not be more short-sighted.

The fundamental function of any assignment for the student varies depending on the skills needed to complete the task. However, it is always true that the assignment is a test of the student’s understanding of the topic, ability to bring together ideas from various locations and come to a logical, reasonable conclusion on their findings… and not a test of their ability to ‘hack’ the system (although hacking is a skill of it’s own, it’s not the point of academia).

Where this point becomes even more potent, is when a professional academic plagiarises. The academic is not there to get a degree so that they can leave university and start telling people what to do in a hipster marketing apartment; they are there to teach, and to pursue the advancement of human knowledge. And to that effect, they should share, collaborate, and combine knowledge. They should be proud of the fact that they read and expanded on the work of another human with whom they share that same goal, for it underpins their work as an extension of previous well-founded discoveries and assuages doubt and inaccuracies in their findings.